Meditation is easy to define, right? Is meditation when you relax or focus on an item? Well, what about relaxing and looking at a TV set? Yet most people would agree watching TV is not meditating.

It turns out meditation is harder to define than one may think. One scientific review states that the “procedures characterized as meditation have been little or not at all defined”.

To see what people associate with meditation, we can look at what they tweet about when they mention meditation. Taking 10,000 recent tweets and finding the most common words, I created a word cloud. The larger the word in the word cloud, the more the word is mentioned in the tweets:

As we can see from the word cloud, people have many associations with meditation.

Another perspective is grouping different techniques by what they have in common.

Different cultures have created many forms of meditation and different techniques focus on different senses.

Meditation can simply be put as a technique to enhance relaxation and happiness.